Mazda CX: 'I'm not polluting the road as much as I look like I am.' Photographs: Simon Stuart-Miller for the Guardian

The arrival of this one coincides with my son starting at nursery. I find myself doing my first ever school run in an enormous car, with just one tiny passenger in the back, choking up and blocking up the narrow London streets. What the hell happened? Overnight I've become one of the people I hate most in the world.

It's only up the road, too. Why didn't we walk? Well, we could have done – should have done, really – but it's tipping it down with snow, and I just thought it would be good, on the first day, not to show up shivering and blue. The one day of the year I could possibly justify a 4x4, I've got one. May as well use it…

Oh. Just one problem: it's not a 4x4. There are all-wheel-drive CX-5s, of course, it's just that this isn't one of them. It may look tough, especially with its huge, 19in alloy wheels, but it's a sheep in wolf's clothing, no more use on a slippery slope than any other front-wheel-drive car.

In many ways the CX-5 is an excellent vehicle. You get loads of room and stuff for the price. It might not be beautiful, but it's no more hideous than any of its rivals. It's very well equipped, if a bit drab, inside. And the fuel consumption and emissions figures are excellent for one of these so-called compact SUVs (they're even better, running costs even lower, in the diesel, but that costs a bit more).

Even if I'm blocking up the road, I'm not actually polluting it as much as I look like I am. I'm Monbiot dressed as Clarkson. No, not Monbiot, that's not fair, he definitely would have walked, into the blizzard, towing his kids on a sledge, wrapped in recycled seal skins, for miles and miles across the frozen tundra. And not really Clarkson either – he'd want something much grander, and much more powerful.

Anyway, I don't really see the point of these two-wheel-drive SUVs. You can't go anywhere in them you can't go in any other car. Nor are they any better in snow and ice. And yet they have all the bad stuff. They're too big, for this country's cities and supermarket car parks (someone hit and cracked my wing mirror while I was parked up – partly my fault, granted, for not folding them away, but partly the car's fault for being too wide). And everyone hates you – for killing the planet, even if you're not (too much). And if they know that you're not killing it too much (which they won't), they'll hate you for taking up too much of the road, on a short school run, with just one small person in the back. I do actually hate myself right now.